baleroc
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Arcane Brilliance: Why the one true spec assumption is a lie
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. Now, before we get started, I want you all to look at that picture and realize that at one point in my life, that kid was rad. He was cool. I was never that cool, but you better believe I wanted to be that cool. I wanted to have a sweet mullet and wear acid-washed jeans and a pink shirt and give a thumbs-up while I played Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers one-handed in my Nintendo/baseball/helicopter lair. Just remember that. This kid was the absolute best, and everybody knew it. I don't know how to tell you this, but we are all wrong. All of us. Oh, we mages are right about some things: Most everything can be improved by turning it into a sheep, If you're going marshal arcane energy and bend the fabric of space time to conjure food from thin air, you might as well be conjuring cake and strudel, and yes, it is still and always will be true that the only good warlock is the one that has been reduced to unrecognizable chunks of scorched viscera. But about a few very important details, we are most definitely all mistaken. Here are a few things we all seem to accept as true: Arcane is the undisputed top mage raiding spec. If you are a mage, and you are raiding as anything other than arcane, you are hurting your raid and limiting your own effectiveness. Frost is a PVP spec, and hasn't been a viable raid spec since the days when Ragnaros lived in Molten Core and didn't have legs. All of those statements contain elements of truth, but I am here to tell you -- as emphatically as I can -- that they are lies. They are gross generalities that rise from popular perception, and I firmly believe that our almost universal acceptance of them as fact hurts the game as a whole.
Spiritual Guidance: Besting Baleroc (and other shadow priest alliteration)
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen's soaks all Baleroc's Torment, while inflicting Torment of his own onto the heads of certain boomkin bloggers. If you ask me, variety is what makes a good raid. You have different, unique bosses, with different, unique mechanics. Some have adds; some don't. Some send you soaring through the skies. Some have weird vehicle mechanics. And some encounters, bless their hearts, are Patchwerk-style simple. That's sort of the niche Baleroc the Gatekeeper fills. There are some mechanics you need to know, of course -- it's not a mindless stand-and-DPS fight. There is one phase and there is one key DPS mechanic. And as far as that mechanic goes, we shadow priests are stars of the show.
Ready Check: WoW Insider's Guide to Baleroc, the Gatekeeper
Ready Check helps you prepare yourself and your raid for the bosses that simply require killing. Check back with Ready Check each week for the latest pointers on killing adds, not standing in fire, and hoping for loot that won't drop. Greetings again, raiders! If you have been following along thus far, then you know that we've pushed rather deep into Ragnaros' territory. Already, we've defeated the great hunter Shannox, the queen of spiders Beth'tilac, the vicious Lord Rhyolith, and the treacherous Alysrazor. With the first four of Ragnaros' supporters dead, we now focus on making our way into the heart of the Sulfuron Spire itself. Only one obstacle stands in our way: the Gatekeeper Baleroc. Wielding his twin devastating swords, Baleroc is no pushover. This encounter will test the resolve of both your healers and your DPS as you race against a tight enrage timer while combating insurmountable tank damage. No joke --your tanks will be taking this in the millions on this encounter, so you'd better prepare yourselves, heroes. This journey is just getting started.
Encrypted Text: Rogue tips and tricks for Firelands, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Chase Christian will be your guide to the world of shadows every Wednesday. Feel free to email me any questions or article suggestions you have. If there's one trend that I am enjoying in Firelands, it's that the encounters are much more rogue-friendly than those of the previous tier. We're not swapping targets as often, and there are several fights where combat rogues get to shine via Blade Flurry. There are also role-based encounters like Rhyolith, where our DPS is less important than our reaction time and planning. Beth'tilac and Baleroc start very differently, but they both finish with a race to beat the ever-increasing damage being dealt to the tank. Rogues are particularly effective against both bosses, especially since both are simple fights that let us establish our rotations. Rogues prefer to focus on single targets, as opposed to specs like boomkins and shadow priests that prefer tossing their DOTs around.
The Light and How to Swing It: Tanking Baleroc (and somehow surviving to the end)
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 24 other people, obsessing over his hair (a blood elf racial!), and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense. Perhaps it's just me, but I find Baleroc to be one of the most intense fights to tank that I've thus far encountered in Firelands. You have three phases featuring varying degrees of speed at which you'll be mashed into a fine gruel, all performed by a dual-wielding boss with a swing speed that barely lets you catch you breath from the one-punch before the subsequent two-punch comes screaming in across your sweat-drenched brow and knocks whatever remaining molars you've managed to hold onto right out of your bloody maw and into the general direction of the profanity-uttering feral druid beside you. Or at least, that's how my active imagination likes to picture it while I'm laying on the ground waiting for my battle rez. It doesn't have to be that way, though. Despite his bag of tricks, Baleroc still comes up short in comparison to the raiding paladin, if only because our bag of tricks is actually a massive steel tool cabinet, and each drawer is packed with amazing tools that can cut right through whatever the boss might throw at us. We're like the iPhones of tanking -- there's a cooldown for that. Continue on, and I'll detail how to use each of your abilities to their optimum effect and thus achieve that hallowed nirvana of the boss fight: not having to get rezzed at the end.
The Light and How to Swing It: How to rock Baleroc
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like how to fly, you fools. While I hate to boil down an entire encounter to a single idea, sometimes it simply can't be helped: Baleroc is the healer fight of this tier of raid content. The developers have been throwing one healer fight at us per tier since Wrath began, making Baleroc the latest in a long line of mechanics designed to let healers play outside the box. Chimaeron and Anub'arak made us focus on keeping health pools low but not too low, while Loatheb and Valithria challenged our burst and sustained throughput. General Vezax's awful aura forced us to make every point of mana count, although our love affair with intellect helped us weather that storm. Baleroc makes us choose between healing the raid and healing the tank. It's one of the age-old questions for healers, but Baleroc has upped the ante with the Vital Spark/Vital Flame mechanic. The choice of healing targets is transformed from a simple problem to a crucial decision, as the wrong move can cause a wipe. Luckily for you, Beacon of Light will help you truly shine on this encounter, allowing holy paladins to dominate the top 40 board on World of Logs.
Totem Talk: An enhancement guide to Shannox and Baleroc
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) Every fight in Firelands has its positives and negatives for enhancement shaman. Rhyolith takes reduced damage for 60% of the fight, but he goes molten at 25%, and you need to burn him before he burns you. Beth'tilac spends the first 3 minutes making you run around like a confused wildebeest while you try to avoid scary fire on the ground, but then he gives you a nice, long burn phase at the end. This seems to be the Firelands model, at least in the first four fights. Every fight has periods of low damage to the boss followed by intense DPS phases. Shannox, the Hagrid of Firelands, is no different. His first phase will either make you want to rip your movement keys off your keyboard or make you want to reroll an arcane mage, while his second will just make you want to roll arcane.
Raid Rx: Healer's guide to Baleroc
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand pooh-bah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast. This Baleroc encounter gave me a big fit both on the healing management side and the micromanagement side. It is entirely about the healers and their ability to switch assignments on command. Peripheral vision plays a huge role, so make sure your camera angles aren't too far out, or else you'll miss the crystal spawns. Stay too close, and you'll be blasted with a debuff that will cause your healing ability to plummet and almost assuredly lead to a tank death. After successfully healing with both the one-tank method and the two-tank method, I prefer the two-tank method. My thoughts and the methods laid out reflect my raid group in a 25-player setting.
The Queue: The one with goombas
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today is a very special treat. We have your standard-length Queue, plus I answer a very exciting bonus trivia question that has nothing at all to do with World of Warcraft! But you will love it, my gamer pals. You will. Camero asked: In the past week, I've recieved four emails from "Blizzard" all asking me to do something in order to get a Winged Guardian License. I just wanted to confirm that's not true.
Totem Talk: Restoration shaman tips on healing Shannox and Baleroc
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how. We've gone from tracking your cooldowns to talking about downing bosses in The Firelands. Last week, we discussed taking down a giant, fiery arachnid and stepping on the toes of a rather crotchety old elemental that needs a little assistance turning left and right. Now that our first foray into the Firelands is complete, and with a couple of kills under our belts, it is time to venture further into the land of fire and really ugly elementals! This week, we will be talking about two more bosses in the land of Ragnaros' rule. One is supposedly the greatest hunter of all time, though I have yet to see him kite General Drakkisath while his party deals with the adds, so I can't verify this claim. The other seems to think that he's in a Peter Jackson movie and that we are apparently a raid full of Sir Ian McKellens.This week's image is supplied by the wonderful and talented MagicalMelonBall. I stepped into a Crystal Prison Trap once, and the carbonite jokes just keep coming.
The Light and How to Swing It: Just how masterful can mastery healing get?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. Sometimes I feel like I can't get away from Illuminated Healing. Our holy paladin mastery has been receiving nonstop tweaks since its introduction, and it's always flirting with viability. Stats like haste and critical strike rating are predictable. I can draw up some formulas to show you how many extra ticks of Holy Radiance you'll receive at a given haste level. Mastery is much more nebulous than that, as its effectiveness depends entirely on the encounter and your healing assignment. Everyone has some amount of mastery rating on their gear, and there's even some passively built into our characters. While having a bit of mastery to make our heals bubbly helps our throughput, it's certainly not overpowered. There are a few holy paladins who, in an attempt to see how far Illuminated Healing can go, have enchanted, reforged, and gemmed into mastery completely. With IH bubbles absorbing 35% of the value of the original heal, stacking mastery can obviously make something interesting happen. How potent can Illuminated Healing really become?
Patch 4.2: Firelands bosses voice emotes
Firelands bosses Lord Rhyolith, Alysrazor, Shannox, Baleroc, Fandral and Ragnaros all have their voice emotes in with the new patch 4.2 PTR patch. Want to take a listen? They are all right here! Fair warning for spoilers and all that jazz, so hit the jump for the full clips. This post contains patch 4.2 spoilers.
